The Government of Quebec lost nearly a billion dollars in the race for personal protective equipment (PPE) at the start of the pandemic, mainly due to its lack of preparation and its “late reaction” to an emergency situation. such a magnitude, a report by the Auditor General of Quebec (AG) revealed on Wednesday.
The report reveals, under the heading “Late Response,” that the Department of Health and Human Services placed its first-ever order for masks on February 18, 2020. This therefore came almost a month after the declaration of the first case of coronavirus in Canada, on January 27, and several days after the declaration of a “public health emergency of international concern” by the World Health Organization (WHO), on January 30.
The Ministry of Health and Social Services (MSSS) also “carried out its first inventory of PPE on March 6, 2020, when the Director General of the WHO had reported in early February that the demand for PPE was 100 times higher than usual,” writes the VG in her report. The audit also reports archaic methods: “each establishment had to manually enter its data into an application”, and each of them had “its own inventory system with its own product codes”.
The MSSS finally began “massive purchases of PPE” on March 22, 2020, 11 days after the WHO declared a state of health emergency and four days after the first death from COVID-19 in Quebec. .
In an emergency, the ministry therefore invested more than 3 billion dollars for the purchase of PPE between January 1, 2020 and June 31, 2021. A third of this amount (33%) was used to purchase masks, the rest going to the acquisition of protective gowns (27.4%), gloves (22.1%) and N95 masks (13.7%), mainly.
Since the MSSS had “not planned sufficient measures to promote a sufficient supply of PPE in the event of a pandemic”, it had to acquire these “as a matter of urgency to protect the population, while prices were reaching peaks”, notes the report.
Then, “the significant drop in value of PPE acquired at high prices during the global shortage of 2020 resulted in financial losses for the government of $ 938 million as of March 31, 2021”, notes the VG.
The losses are explained by the depreciation of 671 million in the value of PPE inventories, then by the devaluation of contracts for the purchase of PPE (loss of 131 million) and prepaid orders (loss of 136 million).
Outdated contingency plans
The VG audit leads to another clear observation: the health emergency plans of the Ministry of Health and Social Services “had not been updated for more than ten years and quickly proved insufficient” to cope with a pandemic.
As coroner Géhane Kamel’s hearings on deaths in CHSLDs revealed, the government had not updated its plan to fight an influenza pandemic since 2006, despite the fact that the MSSS had asked that this be done. be done in 2021, after the H1N1 pandemic.
Moreover, Quebec had no national reserve of material useful during an epidemic when the first wave hit, although this was included in the 2006 plan. Before the coroner in November, the assistant deputy minister responsible for Supply, Luc Desbiens, also admitted that his teams had not drawn up a formal list of essential products or established agreements with suppliers.
The VG arrives at the same conclusion: “the MSSS had not planned any measure to facilitate the supply of PPE to the network in the event of a pandemic”, she wrote in her report. “The lack of complete, reliable and up-to-date information on PPE stocks and consumption has hindered informed decision-making by the MSSS regarding the supply and distribution of PPE,” she also writes. .
Given this, and given the absence of an up-to-date pandemic plan, the ministry “should have reacted more quickly to the warning signs of the appearance of the disease in Quebec”, she judges.
The VG also writes that the lack of information to assess PPE needs was such that the government limited access to protective equipment in CHSLDs and private residences for seniors (RPA) during the first weeks of the pandemic. , since these “were not considered in the priorities” established by the MSSS. The “priority level” of CHSLDs was finally raised on March 23, 2020 and that of RPAs on April 7, 2020.